Telling the Time in Python

00:00 It’s time for you to create your first datetime object. To begin, you’ll need to import the datetime module in Python. You can do this by typing in the following code: from datetime import datetime as dt.

00:12 I prefer to import the module as dt. However, this is not required. Next, you can instantiate a datetime object by setting a variable name of your choice equal to dt.now() method.

00:25 For this example, I’ve named my datetime object now, but you can name it something different if you wish. When you call your datetime object, you can see that Python returns several numbers.

00:36 However, in this format, the meaning of each number is not very clear. In order to get a more readable output, you can use the print() function when calling your object.

00:47 As you can see, the output is now more readable, showing the year, month, and then the date followed by the current time of day.

00:54 When printing datetimes, Python closely follows formatting standards known as ISO 8601 formatting. You may have seen this before, as it is a common method of formatting times and dates.

01:06 You can also specifically call the ISO-formatted date and time in Python by using the .isoformat() method.

01:14 As you can see, this output very closely aligns with using the print() function alone. However, in this example, you can see a T, which acts as the standard separator between the date and the time.

01:25 If you’d like to remove the T separator, you can add a separator argument to the .isoformat() method using a single space as the separator instead, like so.

01:41 In this lesson, you learned to create datetime objects. You also learned how to call datetime objects using the print() and .isoformat() functions.

01:50 In the next lesson, you will learn about some of the different methods and attributes that can be called on datetime objects.